Aline
Soules' work has appeared in journals, e-zines, and anthologies such as The
MacGuffin, Literature of the Expanding Frontier, Kenyon Review. She earned an
MA in English, MSLS in Library Science, and an MFA in Creative Writing.

Review
by Carol Smallwood

Recently
I had the good fortune of reading dozens of books as one of the judges in a
national poetry contest but none had the timely theme of widowhood: actuary
tables state women live longer than men and our own observation bears this out.
The chapbook, Evening Sun: A Widow's Journey by Aline Soules, opens with
"Changing Direction" and closes with "Notes VII;" the
twenty-nine poems are dedicated to her husband, Donald Keith Soules
(1944-1999). Poems from her chapbook have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize
and have appeared in such journals as Shaking Like a Mountain, The Houston
Literary Review.

One
of the strengths of the chapbook is that Soules uses everyday activities such
as washing dishes and grocery shopping to show the loss of her husband with
such depth and poignancy that readers immediately relate. Loss and grief are
some of the universals we must all figure out how to deal with and readers can
understand the experience even if it is not a spouse. In the poem, "Things
I Need to Tell You. Questions I Want to Ask" is the memorable stanza:

I
tried to give away your baseball glove,

a
first baseman's I discovered

(did
you tell me that?), but it's left-handed

and
the boy who'd love to have it is a righty.

Remembering
places where one has been with loved ones is often done. Soules recalls time on
Lake Erie, "an inland sea with no tide/water lapping over and over."
In another poem they are on a river: "You dip your paddle/to turn the
canoe. I lay mine across my knees/". In the poem, "Winter Walk,
Hoapili Trail" the couple walk on a lava road in Hawaii: "our feet
slip on loose black rocks/sounding like cutlery shifting in a drawer./"

Soules'
poems are not long and captures pathos with economy and elegant craftsmanship
without sentimentality or overtones of complaint. The poems are not the longer
narrative prose poems that appear in her Mediation on Woman. Various locations
such as Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, Meadow Brook Festival in
Michigan, Death Valley in California, and famous musicians such as Ravel,
Horowitz, Dvorak help shape the chapbook that shares with the reader a widow's
journey/personal elegy, in the carefully selected lyrical and understated free
verse poems.

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